فصل 32

florian

I dragged the dead German into a wooded thicket and covered him with snow. But what if someone found him? I gripped my pistol and searched through the trees for light. Using the scent of fire as a guide, I walked quickly through the forest. I should have known. It had been too quiet today. The Polish girl saw the gun and thought he was going to shoot. She thought she was defending me.

The girl followed. When I looked to the right I heard her breathing stop, trying to swallow the tears. My sister, Anni, did the same thing the day Father sent her away up north. She did not want to cry. She held her breath in one hand and her suitcase in the other.

The memory brought pain to my stitched wound. I still smelled smoke and hoped it signaled a resting spot. If I couldn’t rest, I wouldn’t get far tomorrow.

We emerged from the woods. The Polish girl pointed. In the distance, a large manor house sat on a loaf of frozen earth. The house was dark, but smoke coughed from one of the center chimneys, grayer than the gray sky.

Was it a trap? The frozen meadow leading to the warm house could be a minefield.

The girl moved close. I shared her concern. What if the house was nested with Germans or Russians? Either would be a problem. The Russians would kill me or take me hostage. The Germans would demand to know why I wasn’t in uniform.

I didn’t want to imagine what they would do to the girl.

“We’ll follow the tree line until we’re closer,” I whispered. “We’ll see who’s there.”

One thing I knew for sure—we would not find a kindly old couple enjoying an evening pipe and needlepoint in the drawing room.